


dance the warrior

by la_dissonance



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Angst, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 09:42:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4620615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_dissonance/pseuds/la_dissonance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Isabela has the strangest sensation, as if several layers of her skin have been stripped off. "We should go to my room," she says.</p><p>Merrill grins like the sun coming out on a cloudy day.</p><p>"To <em>talk</em>," Isabela clarifies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dance the warrior

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Warrior by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Merrill finds her at the bar in the quiet time of day before the lunch rush really gets going, and long before the evening crowds pour in. So, objectively, morning.

"Need help getting to Hightown, sweet thing?" Isabela asks. It wouldn't be the first time.

Instead, Merrill takes the stool next to Isabela at the bar and orders a hot tea. 

"I was hoping to find you here," she says.

Isabela tilts her head to the side. Merrill looks — a little frayed, a little worn thin. "Anything I can help with?" 

"You've had many lovers, haven't you, Isabela?"

Isabela laughs. "Depends on how many you count as 'many', I suppose."

"More than two?"

"Oh, then _very_ many."

"Would you mind having one more?"

 

*

 

Isabela is not opposed to the idea, in and of itself, but she has some misgivings. Also, she would gut anyone who hurt Merrill without a second thought, and that would be a messy and regrettable act to have to perform on oneself.

"You're being awfully quiet," Merrill says. She blows delicately on her tea, waiting Isabela out.

"I'm...surprised," Isabela hedges. "What brought this on?"

"I'm lonely," Merrill says, simply. "I have Hawke and Varric and you, and the others. You're all very good friends. But sometimes, that's not quite everything you need, is it?" 

Isabela has the strangest sensation, as if several layers of her skin have been stripped off. "We should go to my room," she says. 

Merrill grins like the sun coming out on a cloudy day.

"To _talk_ ," Isabela clarifies.

 

*

 

 _Why come to me for this?_ is not what Isabela asks. Instead, she says, "This isn't going to be a relationship, is it? You should know that I hate relationships, I avoid them at all costs."

"I was thinking something more like the way we are now, but with more fucking?"

"Maker," Isabela says. "You know I care about you deeply, Merrill, and I'm flattered you would have come to me with this, but — do they have friends with benefits, among your people?"

Merrill is wandering the room, unabashedly looking into corners and picking up trinkets only to put them down again. Isabela might have cleaned, had she known. Or at least called the maid to make the bed.

"The People pair for life," Merrill says. "It is an oath we treat with great sincerity, and a powerful bond."

"So no sleeping around, then? No meaningless tumbles in the hay? Nothing casual and fun, just... solemn oaths and bonding for life?"

Merrill shakes her head. "Not usually, no. But it doesn't matter; I'm not looking for the rest of my life, now. And I trust you."

"This would end very badly," Isabela says, feeling her resolve slipping.

"But until then, why be lonely?"

"I'm not —" Isabela starts, then realizes Merrill could easily be talking about herself. Isabela grumbles, but makes her way over to the bed. "You have a disastrous effect on my pirate bravado," Isabela says, crawling up to meet Merril where she's sitting cross legged in the middle of the unmade bed.

"I like your bravado," Merrill says, with a smile like the sun.

 

*

 

Merrill is absolutely wicked in bed. Her fingers are _too_ nimble, her mind is too quick, her body too tightly wound. She kicks every sensation up to eleven, and it's all Isabela can do to keep up.

 

*

 

"You're so _big_ ," Merrill says, about five minutes into that first heady morning together. "I'm sorry, but I have to say it, otherwise I'll be thinking it the whole time and you'll be able to tell, anyway."

"You're rambling," Isabela points out, gently, leaning in for another kiss. Merrill just shrugs one shoulder, a devil-may-care attitude she must have picked up from Hawke. It's a good look on her, Isabela decides. 

Merrill measures the span of Isabela's shoulders with both hands, then lets them drift down to cup her breasts. Her thumb teases idly over Isabela's nipple as she says, "Really, though, you humans are just so _large_. You have no idea, it's truly amazing."

Isabela laughs, then gasps as Merrill's thumb does something delightful. "You haven't seen anything, yet." She rolls them over, letting Merrill feel the full height and bulk of her. "Now let me amaze you," she breathes into Merrill's ear.

 

*

 

No one knows, but also no one _doesn't_ know.

It's exactly the type of gray ambiguous state that Isabela would ordinarily feel most at home in. But she's so used to hiding secrets behind her smokescreen of libertine attitudes that she's not quite sure what to do with someone else's secrets. Or when the secret _is_ one of her libertine attitudes.

"You've never said anything about us to the others," Merrill says one morning, after a night of keeping Isabela breathless and pinned down beneath wiry thighs and tendrils of magic.

"Oh," Isabela says. "I didn't think it was my tale to tell."

Merrill cuffs her on her side. "You're as much a part of this as I am, ma vhenan."

"You shouldn't call me that, sweet thing," Isabela says. But she doesn't ask her to stop.

 

*

 

Merrill kisses like someone starved for it. She kisses Isabela in the marketplace, in the shadow of the bookseller's stall, with more heat than she kisses her when they're alone in bed. 

Isabela, who has not had someone to kiss behind a market stall in all the time since she came to Kirkwall, is easily pulled into the whirlwind of Merrill's affections. She'll pull Merrill into her lap when they're playing Wicked Grace in Varric's suite, and drop kisses along the line of her neck between turns. 

They kiss against a sun-warmed rock on the Wounded Coast, languid and slow, and they kiss when rushing into a fight in Lowtown, once, for good luck.

"We must be insufferable," Isabela says, laughing, as Aveline crossly chases them out of her office.

"Mm," Merrill agrees. "All our friends hate us and begrudge us our happiness. Whatever shall we do."

The only appropriate response, of course, is to press her up against the nearest wall and kiss her again.

 

*

 

They spend most of their time together in the Hanged Man, when they're not out helping Hawke with one of their seemingly endless errands for anyone and everyone in Kirkwall. It's a nice central location, and one that Merrill seems able to find with a high measure of regularity.

Sometimes, though, they spend an entire day in Merrill's tiny Alienage house. Once she can get Merrill past her nerves at having to play host, Isabela _loves_ it. The books, the arcane knicknacks, the way Merrill's habit of restlessly touching every item in a room makes sense here, where the floor is sloped and the furniture is held together with string and everything in the house seems ready to fall over at any moment. 

"It's so quiet here," Isabela remarks, the first night she stays over.

Merrill's eyes flash with recognition. "I know," she says, softly.

Isabela thinks about the thin walls in the Hanged Man, the drinking songs echoing up the stairs until late at night, the everyday sounds of people living and fucking and fighting on either side of her own room.

"I can't imagine it's much louder out in the woods," she says.

"Oh, but it is. You can't hear _anything_ here. When I first moved in, I felt like I had cotton in my ears for days. All these people all around, and then poof! You go into your house and it's like they were never there. Out in the woods, there's at least birds and crickets and the wind, if there aren't any people nearby."

 _You have a person nearby now,_ Isabela thinks, but she doesn't say it. She wouldn't want to make herself indispensable.

 

*

 

Merrill has her stripped down to her gold and nothing else, one hand deep within her and the other tracing intoxicating patterns up and down her spine, when she says, "What about Aveline, though?" as if it was part of something thee'd been discussing for days.

Isabela is too liquid to respond, at the present moment, so she says, "Ask me again later, sweet," and Merrill twists her fingers _just so_ and Isabela's world shakes itself to pieces.

Much later, when they're lying on their backs, Isabela idly carding her fingers through Merrill's hair, Merrill brings it up again. Isabela yawns. It's three o'clock in the afternoon, but Andraste's sacred tits, could she use a nap.

"What about Aveline, darling?"

"Do you see the way she watches us, sometimes? I think she's lonely, too."

And well, if that isn't several new things to think about all at once.

 

*

 

Isabela spends a few days doing everything in her power to avoid thinking about it too deeply — primarily drinking and picking duels with entitled nobles wherever she can, which works reasonably well. There's no reason she and Merrill shouldn't broaden their casual, friendly arrangement to include Aveline as well. Isabela _has_ seen the way she looks at them, and the idea of helping the repressed captain of the guard get a well-deserved and long overdue lay (or ten) is a very appealing one. 

Usually it takes her a lot longer to break out of a duel-drink-and-deny spiral, but usually she doesn't have Merrill to unrelentingly prod things along. 

"What? Why wouldn't we ask her?" Merrill asks.

"She's only been with one man in her entire _life_."

"So?"

Merrill's persistent inability to understand that not all others might share her exact sense of sexual fluidity will never cease to be one of the things Isabela loves most about her.

"...I suppose it wouldn't hurt to at least ask. Her face will be priceless."

 

*

 

"I've been thinking," Aveline says, sitting down without ceremony at their small table.

"Do go on, this sounds fascinating," Isabela says.

"If your...proposal...is still on the table, I have a counter-proposal." She waits.

"Definitely still on the table," Isabela purrs. "I'd hate to turn down the chance to find out what you're hiding under all that armor." Aveline turns gratifyingly pink.

"We would love to hear what you have in mind, Aveline," Merrill says.

"I propose a trial period. If it goes well, I _may_ be open to discussing — discussion only, Isabela, don't get any ideas — the full proposal."

Merrill scrunches up her face. "So you want a threesome before you think about being our girlfriend?" 

"That can easily be arranged," Isabela says.

Aveline goes red again and makes a face that must make her enemies tremble in their boots, but grits out, "Yes, to be perfectly blunt. I thought I had made myself clear."

Oh, this is going to be fun.

 

*

 

Aveline, in general and also in most of her particulars, drives Isabela up a wall. She's fairly certain the sentiment is mutual.

That's got to be a good 60% of why this is so hot. Merrill is a genius. 

 

*

 

"You don't find it at all, even a little bit, unusual that it's the three of us?"

"Never," Isabela says.

"Not even a little bit," Merrill confirms, sounding smug. She should be; she's managed to charm her way into the middle again.

A scoffing noise comes from Aveline's side of the bed. "Mind you, I'm not _complaining_. It's just hardly the the usual way of things, is it?"

Isabela rolls onto her side and props herself up on an elbow so she can look Aveline full in the face. "Honey, where I've been, gender pirates roam the high seas and nobody marries anyone unless they've got a con to pull. You really think there _is_ a usual way of things in these matters?"

"Yes!" Aveline says, indignant, but it's the last time she brings it up. 

 

*

 

Every once in a while, Isabela thinks it might be easier to leave now, than wait until she starts to feel smothered. It wouldn't be fair to Merrill, not at all, and then she'd have to disembowel herself, so. It's not a thought she ever seriously entertains.

Still, if she ever did leave, at least Merrill and Aveline would still have each other. 

 

*

 

Once, when they're spending the afternoon at Merrill's place, Hawke bursts in on them baking a cake. 

It's not a euphemism, either: Hawke literally walks in on Merrill and Isabela and Aveline up to their elbows in flour and eggs, trying to juggle one recipe card between the three of them and avoid turning over any more mixing bowls or tripping over Aveline's sword.

It must look intimate in some way, though, because Hawke takes one look at them and starts backing out. "I can come back later, if you're busy," they say. 

"Hawke, no!" Merrill protests, dusting off her hands and creating a cloud of flour that makes Aveline sneeze. "What did you need? We're not too busy to talk, at least. Though if you need my help with something, I'll have to go clean up first."

"We could use _your_ help, actually," Aveline says.

Hawke hesitantly agrees to hold the recipe card, at first, and gradually gets pulled into helping with more and more until they're as covered in flour and sugar as Merrill and Isabela. Aveline, somehow, has managed to come this far with only a single smudge of butter on her armor. Hawke holds things when asked, and spends the entire time discussing the metaphysics of ancient elven artifacts with Merrill. 

Things go much more smoothly after that.

The cake comes out oddly solid, but delicious. It is exactly the right size for four people, and they finish it in about a tenth of the time it took to create. 

 

*

 

Aveline is astonishingly frank, for someone with as little experience in romance or sex as Isabela knows her to have. Isabela feels extremely threatened by it, and then fiercely competitive — no one is allowed to have both fewer hangups _and_ have had less sex than Isabela, it's just not right — and then she swings back to threatened again, because there's simply no way she can compete. 

Merrill, of course, is slightly confused but gently entertained at the whole thing. Sometimes Isabela gets the distinct impression that she purposely plays them against each other, just to see what will happen.

It brings a refreshing openness to their lovemaking, if nothing else. Isabela has never heard someone say "I don't know what face sitting is, run that by me again after you explain," in the middle of dirty talk, or "No, it never occurred to me to put anything in my ass for fun," with as much dry confidence as Aveline.

"Isabela was the one who showed me you could use _things_ ," Merrill says, gleefully. "Before that, all I knew was the way with fingers and tongues."

"Didn't know about that either," Aveline says, turning a truly enchanting shade of pink all up and down her chest. 

"I know what we're going to have to try next," Isabela says.

 

*

 

"Have I ever told you how much I love you," Isabela says, gasping as her body shakes its way through the last of her orgasm.

Merrill lays her cheek on Isabela's sticky thigh. "You tell me all the time."

They're passing time between Hawke's missions in Isabela's room; Aveline is back in her office catching up on paperwork. It shouldn't feel like she just said some monumental thing she's never said even to herself; it also shouldn't feel like there's a hollow place in Isabela's chest that would only fill up if Aveline were here to hear it too.

"We should go distract Aveline from her paperwork," Isabela says, half joking, but Merrill has always been notoriously bad at picking up on her jokes. 

"She'd like that, I think," Merrill says. Isabela is only slightly taken aback to find she can't wait. 

 

*

**Author's Note:**

> I owe the gender pirates mention to Candas Jane Dorsey's _Black Wine_ , which is a wonderful (but also incredibly dark & horrifically violent ;__;) book full of pirates and poly and mistaken identities and strong relationships between women that I dearly love and would recommend everyone read immediately *__*


End file.
